Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Literary Influence. The Sagas of Iceland and Ireland
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not also have arisen independently in Iceland. But the
existence of this form of literature in Ireland may be due
to special circumstances for which Iceland offers no parallel.
The oldest Irish sagas belong to that class of literature
known as the heroic epic, a class which among the Teutonic
peoples as indeed among all other European peoples
makes its first appearance in verse. The exceptional treatment
of this subject in Irish is all the more remarkable in
view of the fact that among the Celtic peoples the file or
professional minstrel occupied a distinguished position in
society. It would be strange if the professional minstrel were
not primarily concerned with heroic epic poetry in Ireland
as in other countries, since in the times to which our records
refer the recitation of the heroic prose epics was one of the
chief functions of the file.
On the other hand, we know nothing of the ancient forms
of Irish poetry. The earliest poems that have come down to
us have a metrical form which is not native. Earlier than
these–in the fifth and sixth centuries–there is evidence
for the cultivation of “rhetorics,” or metrical prose, but
this too appears to be of foreign origin.[1] The unique feature
in Irish literature, namely, the fact that the early epic, as
it has come down to us, appears in prose instead of poetry
may be due, at least in part, to the disappearance of native
metrical forms before the fifth century. It may be that the
prose epics originated in paraphrases of early poems such
as we find, for instance, in the Völsunga Saga, which is a
paraphrase of older poems dealing with the story of Sigurthr.
Or the change may have been more automatic, the outcome
of a process of metrical dissolution similar to that of which
the beginnings may be seen in certain Anglo-Saxon and
German poems. Such metrical dissolution would be favoured,
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